Panasonic: Our New TVs DO Support NTFS

Despite what we've said in some of our recent reviews, the media players in Panasoic's latest TVs do support external storage devices that are formatted using NTFS.

Ever since the start of last year, high-end televisions have included media players.  They make life very easy for users: you just copy videos, music or photos onto an external storage device and then plug it into a USB port on the TV.  After that, you can enjoy your multimedia content from the comfort of your sofa.

We have a standard battery of tests for media players that we regularly update.  It includes, video, music and image files encoded using a variety of formats.  We're especially careful to make sure that high-bitrate HD videos work properly, as well as high resolution photos.  We also use RIP and ISO back-ups of DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

Just being able to support NTFS doesn't really help the media players in Panasonic's new TVs that much: during our tests, they could only play AVI, DivX, WMV and Mov video files.  Container formats like MKV, MTS and M2ST all refused stubbornly to play.   A dedicated media centre puts in a much better performance. 

We're upgrading the media centre score for Panasonic's 2011 TVs from 2.3 to 2.8/5—hardly a huge improvement.

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